FEBRUARY 8, 1999:
The most recent of Charles Darwin's many biographers describes Syms
Covington, Darwin's assistant aboard the Beagle, as the
"unacknowledged shadow behind Darwin's every triumph." This view is a
revisionist promotion, but the Australian novelist Roger McDonald tops it
in his new book, Mr. Darwin's Shooter. McDonald's clever and moving
historical novel places Syms Covington in center stage and recasts Darwin
as a supporting actor.

McDonald is a passionate writer who loves the tastes and textures of the
world but never loses touch with the shifting, tempestuous emotions of his
characters. Such attention and imagination naturally beget an original
prose style, but it is still surprising and fun to find McDonald so playful
and Dickensian in his new book. Not surprisingly, he is also a poet and
essayist.

The hero of Mr. Darwin's Shooter is a surprising choice. Syms
Covington is not an important historical figure just now receiving his due.
He was simply in the right place at the right time and had the talent and
character to fill a minor but essential role--man Friday, "shooter," and
factotum to the young adventurer who would become one of the most
influential scientists in history. Nowadays, only archaeologists of
Darwin's era remember Syms Covington.

But the limitations of our knowledge about the historical Covington
don't apply to fiction. Art, as someone once said, exists to cut the raw
taste of the facts. And fortunately, Covington's shadowy role caught the
imagination of a talented novelist. Rather than offering dry variations on
a historical theme, Roger McDonald gives us a wild adventure around the
world that has something of the verve of Robert Louis Stevenson and the
lyricism of Herman Melville.

There is no grander theme than the determination of our place in the
world, and there is no moment in history more fascinating than Darwin's
much-mythologized voyage of discovery. However, you don't need to have read
Darwin's own account of the Beagle voyage to appreciate McDonald's
book. McDonald has created earthy, convincing, sometimes heartbreaking
characters, and, like a film director, has placed their story in lovingly
detailed sets. Every page sparkles with bits of business that flesh out the
reader's picture of daily 19th-century existence. Even more impressive, the
writer captures the taken-for-granted assumptions of an era dramatically
different from our own.

Darwin needed a "shooter" because one of his chief goals, as unpaid
naturalist on what was primarily a surveying mission, was the collection of
animals, plants, and minerals new to science. This task required the
killing of a great many animals and the immediate preservation of their
corpses. Covington was only 15 years old when he first undertook these
tasks aboard H.M.S. Beagle. Darwin himself was in his early
20s.

McDonald's Covington is unrefined to the point of wildness, but he is an
astute observer. He sees straight through the protective manners of those
around him. Darwin himself comes across as a young, well-meaning stuffed
shirt: "Darwin refined his manner of keeping him at arm's length without
spoiling his use. None of this was lost on Covington, who might have no
science but could read the emotions the way naturalists read their Carolus
Linnaeus."

In the first chapter, Syms Covington is 12 years old, running wild,
still marinating in a primitive fundamentalism. McDonald's book follows him
through his first meeting with Darwin, during his life aboard the
Beagle, and on into middle age.

Covington, we learn, is most charming in his youth. The naif's discovery
of the world rediscovers it for us. But Darwin and his shooter are out in
the world not merely to admire nature's artworks but to determine their
place in a scheme of things. In this regard, McDonald nicely captures the
flavor of scientific adventure in the 1830s. "From birds to stones and
bones and back to birds again," he writes, "the mood was always the looking
under of surfaces."

Contrary to their frequent simplistic portrayals, artists and scientists
are not enemies. Their tasks require the same tools--observation and
imagination. Roger McDonald's Mr. Darwin's Shooter, like Darwin's
own Voyage of the Beagle, proves this point. In either science or
art, the most important thing is always the looking under of surfaces.

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac of
Nature in History and the Arts.